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Thursday, March 15, 2007

RealClimate's Touchy Censors

The RealClimate blog, run by guys who make their money promoting the human-caused climate change theory (and by creating hockey sticks), has a reputation for censoring comments to its posts. It's not uncommon for folks to share with others comments that got censored at RealClimate -- comments that seem quite reasonable, but have one thing in common: They don't argue in favor of human-caused global warming.

I had not supposed, however, that the RealClimate bosses were line-editing even the comments they let through. Apparently, they do.

On Wednesday, a commenter to a RealClimate post about "The Great Global Warming Swindle" documentary tried to quote a nine-year-old National Center paper about the climate's natural variability. (See comment #293.)

Nothing doing! The RealClimate guys wouldn't let it stand (was it our paper's reference to the existence of the Medieval Warm Period that vexed them so?).

RealClimate's touchy webmasters removed the excerpt (though they did leave the link), replacing the excerpt with this note:

[lengthy excerpt eliminated. readers can go to this link if they like. But lets not pretend this is honest information; this is an industry-funded disinformation site]

I'd be willing to bet the RealClimate guys have received more grant money relating to the climate change issue than we have, and I further bet that that's a bet they won't take.

Prove me wrong, fellas.

Addendum, 3/16/07: Russell Seitz writes to ask: "Why ought a posse of bona fide scientists trying to keep discussion to the straight and narrow, which is to say the peer reviewed, all facts checked, and results warranted reproducible, allow anybody to invoke anybody's supposed authority at length?"

In my view the owner of the RealClimate.org blog (just who is that, anyway? A domain lookup shows it is the baby of Environmental Media Services; more about them here) can censor any comment its management chooses to censor. We support property rights here at the National Center.

However, RealClimate's management said the National Center's work is dishonest on March 14 and on March 15, in an effort to explain away a debate loss, claimed: "We are scientists, and we talk about science and we're not going start getting into questions of personal morality - and obviously that put us at a sharp disadvantage..."